A sitemap plays a vital role in SEO as it aids in the effective crawling and indexing of your website by search engines. If you have a WordPress website and are using Yoast SEO, the process of creating a sitemap is a hassle-free task. This blog post will provide you with a step-by-step guide on generating a sitemap using Yoast.
Step 1: Install and Activate Yoast SEO
First and foremost, you need to install and activate the Yoast SEO plugin if you haven’t done that already. To do this, navigate to your WordPress dashboard and select ‘Plugins > Add New’. Then, search for ‘Yoast SEO’. Once you find the plugin, click on ‘Install Now’ followed by ‘Activate’.
Step 2: Enable XML Sitemaps
Once you have installed and activated Yoast SEO, the next step is to enable XML sitemaps. To do this, navigate to SEO > General > Features in your WordPress dashboard. Scroll down and you’ll see the ‘XML sitemaps’ option. Make sure that it is toggled on. If it isn’t, click on the switch to enable it. Don’t forget to save your changes.
Step 3: Access and Check Your Sitemap
Accessing your sitemap is quite straightforward. You can find it by appending /sitemap_index.xml to your domain. For instance, if your website is www.example.com, your sitemap will be at www.example.com/sitemap_index.xml. Open this link in a new tab to check your sitemap.
Step 4: Submit Your Sitemap to Google
Finally, you need to submit your sitemap to Google to ensure that Google can crawl and index your site. To do this, you will need to use Google Search Console. If you haven’t set it up yet, follow Google’s instructions on how to add your website. Once you have done this, navigate to Sitemaps in Google Search Console, enter sitemap_index.xml into the ‘Add a new sitemap’ box and click on ‘Submit’.
<title>Sample Site-map Submission</title>
<form action="https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=https://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap_index.xml" method="get">
<button type="submit">Submit Sitemap to Google</button>
</form>
And voila! You have successfully generated and submitted your sitemap using Yoast SEO. It’s important to note that you only need to submit your sitemap to Google once. Google will continue to crawl your sitemap for updates in the future.
Conclusion
With Yoast SEO, generating a sitemap for your WordPress website is a breeze. By submitting your sitemap to Google, you can help search engines understand your site better, which can boost your search engine rankings. If you found this tutorial helpful, feel free to share it with others who might find it useful.